This research has two primary objectives. First is the development of methodology for inferring the main subprocesses employed by a subject in an intellective task, such as decision making. The primary data are the sequence of eye fixations recorded while the subject is making the decision. The proposed methodology relies heavily on the sequential structure of the fixations rather than on summary measures like frequency of fixation and average duration. Other procedures are introduced that identify subprocess units within the eye fixation sequence. These procedures include probe techniques, the use of explicit markers for subprocess termination, and a retrospective verbal protocol prompted by the eye fixations. The goal of the methodology is the use of several different techniques to converge upon the same partitioning of the choice process into subprocesses and the association with each subprocess of a specific subgoal and heuristic. The proposed methodology is viewed as an extension of traditional methods toward the techniques of verbal protocol analysis developed by Newell and Simon (1972). It is expected that the methodology developed in the context of choice behavior will generalize to other intellective tasks that require the repeated acquisition of visual information. The second goal is to test and refine a two-stage characterization of the choice process. Multi-alternative choice may be viewed as a series of eliminations, the first of which was based on the evaluation of single alternatives, analogous to a judgment strategy. The more difficult, later eliminations take place in binary comparisons. Further, a difficult binary comparison requires a dimensional evaluation strategy. This latter heuristic permits a parsimonious explanation of several important binary choice phenomena which have not been successfully accounted for by pure utility models.